What do these two things have in common, other than they’re from (very, very loosely, give or take a decade) the same era?
Photoessay: A few trees
July 5, 2013 by
I thought I’d do something different with today’s photoessay: it’s a collection of images spanning a wide period in my career, but of a single subject. For a landscape photographer, trees, clouds, terrain, water, weather etc. are all staple building blocks of a complete image; for an obsessive photographer, each individual element can yield manifold variations. (Clouds are my other real obsession, but I think I’m going to need more than one photoessay to do those justice.) It’s an interesting idea I’d like to explore further both in future photoessays and opinion pieces. Enjoy! MT
Images shot with a variety of equipment at various times; the different vintages of watermark are the giveaway here.
Kuala Lumpur
Photographic aspirations, part three: a manifesto
June 23, 2013 by
Take your beliefs to the streets.
I actually wrote something like this quite some time ago – it’s still on my flickr ‘about’ page, I believe. It’s actually interesting from a strange self-analysis point of view to see how my views of photography have morphed in the last few years, partially as a consequence of experience, and partially due to the shift towards commercial work. So, perhaps I’ll revisit this post again in another few years and see how things have changed again…
Photoessay: San Francisco monochromes, part two: channeling Winogrand
June 21, 2013 by
One of the exercises I did at the last round of US workshops was an exploration into finding style. Naturally, having taken both of the groups in San Francisco to see the Garry Winogrand exhibition that was on at SFMOMA, there was more than a healthy curiosity amongst the groups to attempt to shoot replicate his way of shooting. I of course had to demonstrate. Whilst I don’t particularly care for his off-center/ misaligned/ ‘loose’ framing and various forms of blurring, I do appreciate his sense of timing and getting into the moment and the scene. Plenty of shooting from the hip or with the tilt screen and a wide lens ensued; the OM-D and 12/2 was weapon of choice. Enjoy! MT
Photographic aspirations, part two: reality, and getting there
June 19, 2013 by
Light at the end of the tunnel: but it’s a long climb, and are you going up, or down?
Reality often isn’t as glamorous as the dream.
In the first part of this essay, we explored the dissonance between the photographer we are, the photographer we think we want to be, and the photographer we actually want to be; today, we’ll wrap up by looking at how you can get there.
Photographic aspirations, part one: who we are, vs. who we want to be
June 17, 2013 by
The disconnect. Leica M 240, 50/2 APO, Yangon.
Everybody has a dream. More realistically, everybody who picks up a camera has some idea – conscious or not – of what they want to get out of it: be it a simple record of an event, or delusions of artistic grandeur. More often than not, there’s a truly enormous gap between where the photographer wants to be, and where they think they are. There yet another gap between where they think they are and where they actually are. For most, the levels tend to shake out with aspiration coming first, followed by self-perception, and then finally, reality. As with most things photographic, there’s just as much psychology involved as technicality.
Photoessay: San Francisco monochromes, part one
June 15, 2013 by
I can’t really say these have a common theme other than reporting on life in the city; however, subjects, light and various urban geometry cooperated at times to make some images I was rather fond of. Enjoy! MT
Thoughts on street photography with medium format
June 11, 2013 by
Ostensibly, this is already perhaps not the most practical of ideas; if one is extremely masochistic, things can be compounded further into the really bad idea class by using film. And a manual focus camera. Without a meter. I think it takes a certain amount of insanity – or at least a healthy dose of optimism – to even attempt it. Street photography (the genre itself being discussed in this previous article) is the kind of thing that’s handled best with a responsive, unobtrusive camera that also has a goodly amount of depth of field for a given aperture, plus what I like to think of as being very forgiving of slightly loose shot discipline. This generally means good high-ISO ability, perhaps a stabilization system, a low-vibration shutter and decently large pixels to make the effects of camera shake less obvious.
Defining cinematic
June 5, 2013 by
Over the last couple of posts, we’ve looked at the qualities of bokeh, and some examples of cinematic photography in New York; although one of the most obvious hallmarks of the cinematic style is an abundance of very out of focus zones, in reality there’s a lot more subtlety to it. Since this is one of my most frequently used and well-developed styles, I felt that perhaps a little intellectual exercise was in order.
Photoessay: New York street cinematics
June 3, 2013 by
Possessiveness of taxis is a New York thing
I found the people and streets of New York to be eminently suited to a bit of cinematic street photography. Perhaps it’s the fact that so many movies have already been filmed in New York, or it’s the quality of light filtering between and reflecting off buildings, or it’s the various diverse characters that live in the city. These are little moments, vignettes and slices-of-life; I don’t want to use the word ‘stolen’, but it does sometimes feel like one is peering into a pre-coreographed scene and simply borrowing a frame. I sincerely apologise in advance for having some fun with the captions.
Ming Thein | Photographer 